Accessibility in the Philippines

We are getting ready to teach an accessibility course in the Philippines. To provide more information about the country, read the situation about accessibility. As a developing Asian country, the Philippines realizes the importance of accessibility to its disabled citizen. In this blog post, we will take a look at the present situation of accessibility in this country.

The Philippine Government’s Position With Respect to Accessibility

The Philippine government is open to the idea of providing more support to accessibility. However, due to other national issues and concerns, accessibility has become a secondary priority for assigned government agencies. Accessibility has nonetheless garnered more recognition now than in the past few years.

Accessibility of Public Places and Commercial Areas

The streets, roads, and other public places in the Philippines lack facilities for disabled people. Only a few areas have audio traffic signals and tactile marks in walkways. Wheelchair ramps are present only in certain government properties and disability-related establishments. As a result, one can rarely find a disabled person traveling alone around the city. Most persons with disabilities prefer to have a companion when commuting to other places.

Colleges generally do not have services specifically for disabled students. These groups of students therefore have to provide their own assistive devices and software at school. In spite of this, academic institutions are now more receptive towards disabled students. With regard to academic events, there are only a handful of conferences and seminars wherein Braille and large print formats of materials are available.

Commercial establishments such as malls also have few accessibility-related facilities. For instance, not all department stores have wheelchair ramps and restrooms designated for persons with disabilities. Companies however are trying their best to train their staff on properly serving and interacting with disabled customers.

Accessibility of ICT in the Philippines

ICT is relatively accessible for persons with disabilities in the Philippines. This situation, however, is prevalent only in highly developed areas of the country. Nevertheless, the number of disabled persons that use assistive technologies is rapidly increasing. As an example, more and more blind and visually impaired people are becoming aware of and are using screen readers and other similar applications.

In relation to this, more disabled people can now use the Internet and access online information. Through these types of technology, disabled Filipinos can use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

A positive result of this is that more disabled people are now having good employment opportunities. Since many disabled people have good Internet access, they can take advantage of work that is entirely done through the Internet. This provides a convenient means of working as they can simply do the tasks at home, hence the term “home-based work”.

As the number of disabled Internet users increases, the issue of web accessibility in the country becomes more evident. Similar to other countries, disabled Internet users in the Philippines often find difficulty in accessing information in certain websites. There are a lot of Philippine websites owned by government agencies and private groups which persons with disabilities have a hard time accessing. To address this issue, concerned individuals have formed groups focusing on web accessibility.

Philippine Web Accessibility Group

The Philippine Web Accessibility group (PWAG) is one of the major advocates of ICT and web accessibility in the country. PWAG is a non-profit government-registered association of web developers and advocates of accessibility in the Philippines. PWAG is tasked by the government to oversee and implement relevant programs on accessible ICT in the Philippines. One of the most noteworthy achievements of PWAG is the creation of the Web Design Accessibility Recommendation (WDAR) Checkpoints.

The Web Design Accessibility Recommendation (WDAR) Checkpoints consist of a set of stages set by PWAG for Philippine web developers to follow. This set of checkpoints is basically a simplified version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). According to PWAG, WDAR was created as a simpler alternative to WCAG. A favorable effect of the WDAR is that more Filipino web developers are convinced to carry out accessibility procedures. On the downside, since WDAR is designed with the Filipinos in mind, these checkpoints become centered solely on the country's population of Internet users.